The story of America can be told in the gap between a police barricade and a velvet rope.
On Monday night, that gap closed around Chris Smalls, who left his blood and dignity on the pavement outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art so that the 1% could sip champagne without the inconvenience of being called out for it.
Smalls, a 37-year-old labor organizer from New Jersey, was tackled by officers of the NYPD for the high crime of attempting to confront Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder worth an estimated $230 billion, who was serving as an honorary chair of the Met Gala.
The official charges read like a laundry list: resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration, criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, and failure to obey traffic devices.
Smalls spent 24 hours in a holding cell. The man who once led the first successful unionization of an Amazon warehouse was processed like common litterbug while the wealthy walked the red carpet in thousand-dollar shoes.
Let’s be clear about who Chris Smalls is.
He was born on the Fourth of July, 1988, in Hackensack, New Jersey, raised by a single mother who worked at a hospital.
He chased a brief career as a rapper, touring with Meek Mill, before trading the mic for a warehouse scanner to feed his three children.
In 2015, Amazon hired him as part of its robot army.
In March 2020, he organized a walkout at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island to protest the company’s lack of safety protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when workers were being told to urinate in bottles to meet quotas.
An internal Amazon memo leaked soon after. In it, a company lawyer described Smalls as “not smart or articulate.”
Not smart, they said, while he single-handedly organized the most significant private-sector labor victory in a generation.
In 2022, his Amazon Labor Union won its election at JFK8, making him one of the Time 100 most influential people in the world.
A more recent chapter—his first book, When the Revolution Comes, is scheduled for release in June.
The arrest has drawn sharp condemnation from Steven Donziger, the disbarred human rights lawyer who won a landmark $10 billion environmental judgment against Chevron only to be crushed by the system he once mastered.
In an Instagram statement, Donziger called the arrest a “brutal” act of corporate retaliation, noting that Amazon had hired the same law firm, Gibson Dunn, to go after Smalls that Chevron had once used to silence him.
In his words, Smalls and he came from very different backgrounds but wound up in the “exact same place: targeted by powerful corporations trying to destroy us for exposing their abuses.”
For 993 days, Donziger was held under house arrest on a contempt charge that human rights groups decried as a sham.
He sees in Smalls’ handcuffs the same long shadow of power and impunity that once darkened his own home.
This is not a complicated tale.
A man who fought for a living wage was arrested outside a party designed to celebrate the people who suppress it.
The irony is so thick you’d need a machete. Smalls has since been released, and prosecutors have offered to drop the charges if he behaves himself for six months.
In this country, the wages of a social conscience are still measured in bruises earned on picket lines by people brave enough to oppose tyranny.
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